
Class. 







Book C± 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



/ 






THE 



LAST YEARS 



OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER: 



A MONOGRAPH. 



BY 



GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS. 






NEW YORK: 
L>. APPLET ON AND COMPANY 

5 4 9 & 5 5 1 BROADWAY. 

1878. 



ET-3 4-0 



[The writer of this pamphlet chanced lately to see a work 
entitled " A Dictionary of General Biography," edited by 
William L. R. Cates, and published (as a second edition) in 
London in 1875. The following is the concluding sentence 
of its article on " Daniel Webster " : " In 1852 he again 
"became a candidate for the presidency ; and, to gain the 
favor of the Southern States, he abandoned the principles he 
had long maintained on the question of slavery, though in 
this case his sacrifice of principle was in vain ; and it is con- 
jectured that disappointment hastened his end." The article 
was probably written by some hack, who had met with simi- 
lar assertions in some American publication, and who knew r 
no better than to repeat them. Of course, he could not state, 
if called upon, what were the principles which Mr. Webster 
abandoned, or what "the question of slavery" was. His 
editor was probably no better informed, although he might 
perhaps have been expected to know that public men in 
America do not become candidates for the presidency unless 
they are formally named as such by the representative body 
of some political organization ; which did not happen to Mr. 
Webster in 1852, or at any other time, excepting that, in 1836, 
he was nominated as their candidate by the Whigs of Massa- 
chusetts, who then gave him the electoral votes of that State.] 

New York, October 24, l^T. 



COPYRIGHT BT 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

1877. 






THE LAST YEARS 



OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 



Me. Webster has been dead for a quarter of a century. 
A generation that never saw him, and that can know him 
only from what he has left and from the report of his con- 
temporaries, has come upon the stage of active life. What 
they are to believe of him, how they and their successors in 
the duties and privileges of American citizenship are to esti- 
mate him, is a matter of some consequence ; for, all things 
considered, he was the foremost American statesman of his 
time. In the whole of his political career there was but one 
occurrence that has been made a subject of serious charge, 
whether justly or unjustly. Such other alleged inconsistencies 
as captious critics have assumed to find in his public conduct 
are mere trifles, in comparison with that one act of his life 
in which it was said that he was grossly untrue to himself 
and to his public duty. I refer, of course, to the celebrated 
speech which he made in the Senate on the 7th of March, 1850. 

He died on the 21th of October, 1852. During this inter- 
val he was pursued, on account of that speech, with a torrent 
of reproach and accusation such as has rarely been directed 
against any other statesman in our annals. Some of it was 
dictated by blind and unreasoning passion ; some of it was 
dishonest ; some of it was sincere. It did not cease at the 
grave, and it has infected, more or less, the general feeling 
concerning him. One class of the accusers was that repre- 



sented by Mr. Theodore Parker, whose malignantly indecent 
sermon, delivered in Boston on the Sunday following Mr. 
Webster's death, embodied the charges in language that would 
have had a terrible import if it had not been steeped in a 
kind of gall that deprived it of all show of truth or reason. 
Another class was that represented by "Whittier's poem, enti- 
tled "Ichabod," which mourned with plaintive and unaffected 
sorrow the supposed downfall of a mighty spirit, whose pre- 
vious moral elevation made his sacrifice of his own principles 
to his ambition a too painful spectacle. Still another class 
was that led by the public men wdio, like the late Mr. Seward, 
found it profitable to speak of Mr. Webster as a "traitor t> 
the cause of freedom." And now we have in the recently 
published autobiography of Harriet Martineau, written in 
1855, her recorded judgment on Mr. Webster's "folly and 
treachery in striving to win the supreme honors of the state, 
by winning the South through the sacrifice of the rights and 
liberties of the North, of necessity more extreme and more 
conspicuous than any double-dealing of Mr. Clay's. His retri- 
bution w T as the more striking ; and the disgrace which he drew 
down on his last days was the more damning of the two." ' 

It is my purpose now to examine this charge more closely 
and more in detail than I could in the Life of Mr. Webster, 
which I published in 1870. Laying aside, so far as I may 
be able, the partiality of a friend and biographer, I shall sub- 
ject to the scrutiny of reason and .good sense the accusation 
that, in Mr. Webster's later years, for the sake of attaining the 
presidency, by bidding for the political support of the South- 
ern States, he renounced the principles which he had professed 
all his life on the subject of slavery. A few preliminary ob- 
servations will clear the way to the principal discussion. 

As a kind of corollary or deduction from the principal 
charge, it became with some persons a real or pretended be- 
lief that, having failed to reach the object of his ambition,, 
Mr. Webster died from the effects of a disappointment which, 
in a man of so lofty a nature, must have been and was greatly 

1 "Harriet Martineau's Autobiography," vol. i., p. 379. Boston: Os- 
good & Co., 1877. 



aggravated by remorse. If the main substance of the charge 
was true — namely, that Mr„ Webster sought to obtain the pres- 
idency by renouncing his own principles in regard to such an 
evil as slavery, in the expectation or hope that such a renun- 
ciation would gain for him the votes of the slaveholders — there 
is hardly any degree of moral reprobation with which his 
memory may not be justly visited. He himself once said that 
"inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circum- 
stances, are often justifiable. But there is one sort of incon- 
sistency that is culpable : it is the inconsistency between a 
man's conviction and his vote, between his conscience and 
his conduct. No man shall ever charge me with an incon- 
sistency of that kind." ] I shall therefore assume that, if Mr. 
Webster was guilty of the enormous violation of his own con- 
science which was laid to his charge, there is no excuse for 
him but that kind of excuse which may always be found for 
human weakness under strong temptation to do wrong. If he 
did wrong, he must have known it; for his intelligence and 
his moral perceptions were of that supreme order which must 
have made it impossible for him to be self-deceived. The men 
who so bitterly accused him were perfectly right in assuming 
that he was intellectually too great and wise, and in his moral 
faculties too clear, not to know when he did a great wrong in 
his public capacity. They were just as right in their calcula- 
tions that his known intellectual supremacy would give a 
sting to their accusation, as were the contemporaries of Bacon 
in assuming, as all subsequent ages have believed, that he 
sinned against his better knowledge when he took bribes or 
presents for his judicial decisions. Great mental and moral 
powers carry with them a corresponding responsibility ; and he 
who towers in faculties far above the average of mankind 
must be judged by a severe standard when any question of 
moral delinquency arises. The difference, however, between 
the case of Bacon and the supposed case of Webster is the 
difference between an admitted fact and a charge that has not 
only never been admitted, but that can be utterly disproved. 
Bacon acknowledged his guilt, and humbled himself before 

1 Speech on the Tariff, in 1846. (" Works," vol. v., pp. 161, 187.) 



6 

his own age and before posterity, asking only that the good 
that he had done might be remembered along with the evil. 
"Where is the evidence that Webster ever admitted, or felt r 
that he had bribed himself, with the hope of the presidency, 
to renounce the principles of his whole life on a subject of in- 
finite concern to his country and mankind ? 

The assertion that Mr. Webster's death was hastened by 
political disappointment was one of those post hoc iwopter hoc 
assumptions by which the popular belief is often misled con- 
cerning great men, until things that are very wide of the truth 
acquire a sort of historical acceptance. Mr. Webster died in 
less than six months after the AVhig National Convention had 
nominated another person as their candidate for the presiden- 
cy ; he is known to have desired, and is admitted to have de- 
served, the nomination ; therefore, this great disappointment 
must have killed him, especially as he had done an act which 
must have laid upon his conscience a heavy burden. Such 
was the nonsense that attained a certain currency, and that 
may still have believers. If I treat it for a moment with 
seriousness, it will be for the purpose of putting an end to it 
in the minds of all reasonable people. 

The circumstances of Mr. Webster's last illness, the au- 
topsy, and the state of his physical system for a period long 
prior to the Baltimore Whig Convention, are enough to show 
that his life, under any condition of his personal fortunes, 
must have ended at about the time when it did end. Although 
his intellectual faculties, as all the world knows, were splen- 
didly preserved to the last moment, there were functional 
derangements in his constitution of long standing that were 
quite sufficient to account for his death, without any theory 
of moral causes. 

These tendencies were, moreover, as I have never doubted, 
much increased by the fall from his carriage in the spring of 
1852, caused by the breaking of some part of the vehicle 
while he was driving on the hills in the neighborhood of 
Marshfield. He never fully recovered from the effects of that 
accident, as a younger man might have done. For two years 
just previous to this occurrence he had performed an amount 
of intellectual labor that must have put a severe strain 



upon his physical powers, strong as they were by nature. 
Who that observed what he did after March, 1850, to con- 
vince the people of the country that they ought to support 
the so-called " Compromise Measures " — who added to these 
voluntary and unofficial labors what his official duties de- 
manded, and who remembered that for twenty years he had 
been subjected to the perpetual drain of the vital forces that 
is wrought by an annual catarrh in its severest type — could 
doubt that the superb physical organization which Nature 
had given him was wearing out ? The friends who saw 
him at intervals, but nearly and in close personal intercourse 
during the last five years of his life, had occasion to observe 
all that can be seen of that wonderful mystery, which pre- 
serves a great brain in its appointed operation, while other 
parts of the system are slowly but perceptibly decaying. 
Some men of marked intellect die when and because the 
brain itself is attacked by direct disease of its substance. Web- 
ster died with his brain in full activity as the organ of intel- 
lect, while other organs, functionally disordered, could no 
longer perform their normal offices. 

With regard to the other branch of the assertion, that Mr. 
Webster suffered from the pangs of conscience as w r ell as 
from disappointed ambition, it is enough to say that he never 
gave any signs of such suffering from the 7th day of March, 
1850, to the moment when he breathed his last breath. 1 The 
whole evidence of what he did in support of the " Compromise 
Measures " shows that he never for an instant doubted either 
the political or the moral propriety of his course in regard to 
them. These, however, it may be said, were " actions that a 
man might play ; " he might, in public, endeavor to convince 
the world that he was right, and yet he might know that he 
had done wrong, and suffer accordingly. In that case, it might 
be expected that, in private and in unguarded moments, some- 
thing would have escaped from him showing the workings of 
a conscience ill at ease. But the individual does not live, and 
never has lived, who, from any means of personal observation, 

1 " Daniel Webster went down to Marshfield to die ! He died of his 
Yth-of-MarcL speech ! " (" Works of Theodore Parker," vol. i., p. 242.) 



8 

is or was entitled to sa} 7 that Mr. Webster ever regretted 
making the speech which drew down upon hitn so much 
wrath. I deny the competency of any witness who has as- 
serted, or professed to believe, that Mr. Webster's last days 
were embittered by any self-reproach for anything that he had 
ever done in the political world. That he died with a con- 
sciousness of other sin, and in hnmble reliance on the mercy 
of God, is highly probable; for he was human, and he was 
religions. But no person who has given currency to the 
idea that he was conscious, and remorsefully conscious, that 
lie had sacrificed his anti-slavery principles to his ambition for 
the presidency, ever had any means of personal observation 
that could have qualified him to express, or that could have 
justified him in forming, such a belief, or in encouraging it in 
others. I doubt if Mr. Parker, for example, ever encountered 
Mr. Webster personally after the 7th of March, 1850, if he 
ever did before ; and as the public evidence shows that Mr. 
Webster, in every possible form, down to the time of his death, 
expressed his adherence to everything he had said on that 
memorable occasion, personal observation of him in private 
was of course essential to enable any one to say that he 
had nevertheless doubts, misgivings, or self-reproaches on the 
subject. 1 Of witnesses to negative facts, which in this case 

1 " He knew the cause of his defeat, and in the last weeks of his life 
confessed that he was deceived: that, hefore his fatal speech, he had as- 
surance from the North and South that, if he supported slavery, it would 
lead him into place and power; hut now lie saw the mistake, and that a 
few of the 'fanatics' had more influence in America than he and all the 
South ! He sinned against his own conscience, and so he fell ! " (" Works 
of Theodore Parker," vol. i., p. 279.) If Mr. Parker had an honest mind, he 
certainly took remarkably little pains to verify assertions, before he adopted 
them and gave to them all the currency that he could. Judging from his 
writings, and allowing him to have been a lover of truth — a supposition 
that requires some chanty — he seems to have had that kind of omnivorous 
credulity in little things which accepts any statement that may be floating 
about, provided it can be pressed into the service of the impression which 
one wishes to produce. What care he took in the formation of his opinions 
upon great religious and social questions, I am not qualified to judge. But 
any intelligent person who had a common observation of what was taking 
place in the world, and who reads Mr. Parker's political discourses, must 
know that habitually, in his attacks upon individuals, he assumed as true 



9 

are very important, there have been, and still are, many en- 
titled to speak. As one of them, I may as well here record 
ray testimony. 

I saw Mr. Webster many times in intimate private inter- 
course, after the speech in question had been made, and be- 
fore the Baltimore Whig Convention of June, 1852, as well 
as after that event. That he desired to be nominated by the 
Whig party for the presidency, and that he had reason to feel, 
and did feel, hurt by their apparent insensibility to his public 
services, is certainly true. That he made a speech, in 1850, 
for the purpose of giving the slave-holding States to understand 
that he had renounced his former principles, and that in him 
they might find a champion, a defender, or an advocate of 
slavery, was a cruelly false and unjust aspersion. It was the 
fashion among his assailants to put the charge in a form which 
carried its own refutation within itself to those who would ex- 
ercise a little reflection, but which was greedily devoured by 
their excited followers. His plan for reaching the presidency 
was, they said, to storm the North and to conciliate the South. 1 

He undertook to storm the North by trying to make men 
believe that the Union was in danger unless certain conces- 
sions were made to slavery, when he knew all the while that 
the Union was in no danger at all. He undertook to concili- 
ate the South bv a great " bid " for the presidency, consist- 
ing of a vast increase of slave territory and the " Fugitive- 
Slave Bill." Such a plan, as a means of making himself Pres- 
ident, would have been worthy of a politician of a very low 
grade of both intelligence and character. In a statesman of 

things which a little scrupulous investigation would have convinced him 
were not true. This hahit of treating contemporaneous events, great and 
small, he carried also into the events of past political history, so that he 
was perpetually giving false colors to the matters of fact with which he 
undertook to deal. 

1 " Here is the reason. He wanted to be President. That was all of it. 
. . . This time he must storm the North and conciliate the South. This 
was his bid for the presidency: Fifty thousand square miles of territory 
and ten millions of dollars to Texas; four new slave States; slavery in 
Utah and New Mexico; the Fugitive-Slave Bill; and two hundred mill- 
ions of dollars offered to Virginia to carry free men of color to Africa." — 
<" Works of Theodore Parker," vol. i., pp. 229, 230.) 



10 

Mr. Webster's capacity and knowledge of the country, to say 
nothing of his integrity, it would have been the grossest folly. 
Before he made the speech of the 7th of March, 1850, lie was 
perfectly aware that, if he conceded anything to the South 
which would result in any increase of the area of slavery, or 
yielded anything beyond the just constitutional rights of that 
section, he never could command the votes of a Northern State 
in the Whig nominating convention ; and certainly he could 
not be made President, or be made the Whig candidate, by 
Southern votes alone. In judging, therefore, of his imputed 
plan of storming the North and conciliating the South, there 
is a question of fact to be settled, which is : Did lie, in truth, 
make any concession to the South in respect to the area of 
slavery which he was not obliged by existing public compacts 
to make, or yield anything in respect to the extradition of 
fugitives from labor that was not demanded by or consistent 
with the Constitution ? It was certainly his own conviction 
always, as I had abundant means of knowing, that in all these 
points his attitude was unassailable, if men would be governed 
by the dictates of truth and justice. 

But I wish here especially to put on record what I observed 
during his last illness. I was with him more than once, alone, 
after it had become in the highest degree probable that his life 
would soon end. Public affairs were often alluded to in his 
private conversations with me, down to the time when he de- 
cided not to allow certain of his Whig friends in New York 
to say that he advised the election of General Scott, the Whig 
candidate. After that matter had been finally disposed of, he 
turned his thoughts entirely away from political subjects, and 
spoke of them no more. But at no time did he utter a word 
that could authorize any one to believe that there was any act 
of his public life that caused him the least regret. He regard- 
ed the Whig party as denationalized ; spoke of it, when he al- 
luded to it at all, as an organization that would be practically 
withdrawn into the North, and that would in no long time be- 
come a sectional party, leaving no national party remaining 
in the South but the Democratic. This he regarded as a great 
evil, dangerous to the future welfare of the Union. He did 
not believe it to be for the good of the country that there 



11 

should be a national Administration that was not thoroughly 
committed to the support of the " Compromise Measures " of 
1850, as a full and final settlement of all questions on the sub- 
ject of slavery on which the national Government could in an v 
way act. It was for this reason that, on his death-bed, he re- 
fused to allow any one to say that he wished his friends to 
vote for the Whig candidate. At the end of twenty-five years, 
and after reviewing everything that occurred at the time of 
this great man's death, I declare it as my firm conviction that 
he died without a shade of regret, or a particle of doubt, on 
account of anything that he had ever said or done in his pub- 
lic life. That he had no reason to feel either doubt or regret 
on account of his course in 1850, and afterward, I shall now 
proceed to show. 

In any judgment that is to be passed upon the charge that, 
in 1850, Mr. Webster sacrificed his anti-slavery principles from 
an ambitious desire to become President, the first thing to be 
done is to settle what his anti-slavery principles were previous 
to that time. The next inquiry will be, What principle that 
he had ever professed did he renounce, or sacrifice, or in any 
way abandon ? If no renunciation, sacrifice, or abandonment 
of principle can be found, it will be but rational to conclude 
that the motive of the speech in question was not a personal 
one, but that it was made for a patriotic purpose, and from an 
imperative sense of public duty. In this discussion I shall 
not ask for any large measure of that indulgence which is ac- 
corded to the supposed inconsistencies of statesmen, brought 
about by new and unforeseen circumstances. It will be seen 
that I deny all inconsistency, and that I mean to apply the 
circumstances in which the Union was placed in 1850 to their 
legitimate bearing, not as reasons for excusing any dereliction 
of principle, but as proofs that there was no such dereliction ; 
that the speech was morally and politically wise and sound ; 
and that, if its teachings had been heeded and followed, this 
country would have escaped a civil war. 

With regard to Mr. Webster's sentiments and principles 
on the subject of slavery, as held and acted upon through the 
whole of his public life, down to the 7th of March, 1850, there 
can be no uncertainty whatever. He regarded the slavery of 



12 

the African race, in certain of the States of the Union, as a 
great social and political evil, founded originally in a violation 
of the natural rights of men, and not to be extended beyond the 
limits within which it was confined at the time of the adop- 
tion of the Constitution of the United States. For any further 
extension that it had received prior to 1850, or for any means 
or opportunities for such extension, no shade of responsibility 
rested upon him. He had always resisted every measure oc- 
curring while he was in Congress that tended to the acquisi- 
tion of territory into which African slavery could be carried. 
But, as every statesman who valued the Constitution of the 
United States, and as every man who was faithful to the 
Union, was bound to do, he accorded to the slave-holding 
States all the guarantees or recognitions of their domestic in- 
stitutions which the Constitution embraced. He stood, all his 
life, as much pledged to respect and uphold those guarantees 
and recognitions as he was to oppose any addition of new 
slave States to the Union. It was, therefore, a well-known 
part of his political creed, that the slave-holding States had a 
fixed constitutional right to the enumeration of their slaves in 
the basis of congressional representation, unequal as the bar- 
gain was by which that right was conceded in the formation 
of the Constitution ; for he held that a public compact must 
be observed, sacredly and in good faith, just as it had been 
made. For the same reason, he always recognized the right 
of the slave-holder to claim a return of a fugitive slave who 
had escaped into a free State, for this provision of the Consti- 
tution had been made a part of the compact between the free 
and the slave States, by which the new Union was made pos- 
sible. In respect to slavery in the District of Columbia, over 
which Congress has exclusive jurisdiction, he considered the 
time and mode of its removal a question of expediency and 
discretion, to be governed by its effect on the adjoining States 
of Maryland and Virginia. In respect to slavery in the " Ter- 
ritories " of the United States, he held it to be the right of 
Congress to prevent its introduction, and that this right ought 
to be exercised whenever there should be any practical neces- 
sity for it. Upon the general subject of the final removal of 
slavery in the States, he regarded it as a matter purely do- 



13 

mestic to the slave-holding States, exclusively belonging to 
them as self-governing communities, and not to be acted upon 
primarily by those whom it did not immediately concern ; 
although he held that Congress might afford collateral aid to 
measures of emancipation initiated voluntarily by any slave- 
holding State. These were the principles, and the only prin- 
ciples, on the subject of slavery, which a constituency, or any 
individual of a constituency, ever had any right to impute 
to Mr. Webster as an American statesman. They cover the 
whole field of the subject, so far as it could come within his 
action or influence as a public man ; and they were perfectly 
well known to his contemporaries, in all their extent and with 
all their limitations. 

Ko man ever had a just right, moral or political, to apply 
to Mr. Webster's conduct any other standard, when a question 
of his personal consistency should arise. People who did not 
like the political principles which he always professed and 
acted upon in reference to the slavery of the African race 
might find fault with them ; but to charge him with a sacri- 
fice of his own principles, because they held his principles, or 
some of them, to be wrong, was just the logical and moral ab- 
surdity which his assailants committed after he had made the 
speech of 1850. For there had grown up, in the course of Mr. 
Webster's public life, a habit of reasoning, or rather of feeling, 
on this subject of slavery, which led to a perfect confusion of 
ideas in the minds of many persons. A certain school of 
moral agitators had arisen, whose teachings had set up a new 
standard of civil duties and obligations. These men, resort- 
ing to what they called, and perhaps believed to be, the Divine 
law — which, however, they interpreted and applied very much 
according to their own purposes — taught that no human law 
or public compact could be of any obligation if it involved 
any recognition or sanction of such a wrong as slavery. In 
their eyes, the Union was a bond of iniquity and the Consti- 
tution a covenant with hell. They struck, therefore, at the 
very foundations of civil obedience and obligation. Whether 
they were aware of it or not, their principles tended directly 
to destroy the fundamental moral basis of constitutional com- 
pacts and civil institutions, and to substitute in its place a 



14 

vague individual interpretation of" the law of God."" Whether 
the civil obligation to surrender a fugitive slave was to be re- 
garded as created by a treaty between the slave-holding and 
the non-slave-holding States, or as the enactment of a funda- 
mental law to be executed by the Federal Government, it was, 
they said, contrary to the Divine law, and therefore it was not 
to be fnl til led. Even if the Union was formed upon the most 
distinct and solemn recognition of the political truth that 
slavery was a State institution, exclusively under the cogni- 
zance of the people of each separate State, the Union was 
in this matter an abomination, because it was a covenant with 
those who lived in a perpetual violation of the law of God, 
securing and protecting them in that violation. This extrava- 
gant radicalism, which it is not easy to describe to younger 
readers, but which they must examine if they would under- 
stand the history of the times about which I am writing, af- 
fected not only the popular feeling in the North on all ques- 
tions and occasions on which the subject of slavery was in any 
way touched, but, as a matter of course, it became in time 
more or less infused into the professions of the politicians, who 
depended for their political support on the popular feeling 
of the communities where these doctrines had become most 
prevalent. In fact, these radical and revolutionary doctrines 
reached some men of high and conspicuous positions in public 
life, and there are not a few Northern statesmen of that period 
whose " records," if examined with even less than microscopic 
scrutiny, would show that they had coquetted, or been more 
or less tainted, with this false philosophy of civil obligation. 
Speeches were made and votes were given in Congress, which 
show how far that radical philosophy had gone to unsettle the 
moral foundations of civil obedience. 

But neither the Northern statesmen, nor the politicians, 
nor the masses of the people, nor the radical teachers of the 
Abolition school, had the smallest right to expect to find Mr. 
Webster adopting any part of this pernicious philosophy be- 
cause he had denounced the slave-trade, or because he had 
opposed the extension of slavery, or because he regarded sla- 
very as a great evil. It was extremely foolish and unfair to 
represent him as unfaithful to his own principles, when those 



15 

who assailed him had set up, as a standard of what the prin- 
ciples of a Northern statesman ought to be, something which 
his principles were not, and which they knew, or ought to 
have known, had never been, and could not be, held by him. 
His whole public life had been spent in the inculcation of 
political doctrines which were the direct opposites of theirs. 
He had taught, as no man who had been born since the Con- 
stitution of the United States was established had ever taught, 
the value and importance of the Union. He had made the 
faithful obligation of public compacts the corner-stone of his 
•whole political system. He had once saved the Union from 
a dangerous heresy, by showing, with a power that no other 
man has equaled, that the Constitution is a fundamental law, 
ordained by the competent authority of the people of the 
United States, and incapable, except by the violence of revo- 
lution, of being resisted or disobeyed by local opposition to 
any of its provisions, requirements, or just deductions. 1 

1 It is a curious illustration of the entente cordiale between the ultra- 
abolitionists of Mr. Parker's school and the extreme States'-Rights men of 
the South, in their political theories, that, to the former, Mr. Webster's 
■views of the nature of the Constitution were as unacceptable as they were 
to the latter. The reason was that, while the Abolitionist set up what he 
called " the law of God " as the measure of civil institutions, he chose 
also to maintain, under the Constitution itself, that the States of this 
Union had a right to judge for themselves what the requirements of the 
Constitution were. If this could be established as a constitutional right, 
the " law of God " would come in to guide the interpretation to a denial 
of every kind of sanction to anything that was obnoxious to a local sen- 
timent. Thus Mr. Parker, in his critique on Mr. Webster's celebrated 
argument against Nullification, plainly intimated that the South Carolina 
doctrine was right. He said that the question was " a deep one ; " that 
it was " the old issue between Federal power and State power ; " that 
Mr. Webster was always " in favor of a strong central Government," and 
" seldom averse to sacrificing the rights of the individual States to the claim 
of central authority." Although he praised Mr. Webster's argument for 
its " massive intellectual power of statement," he did not consider it "just 
in its political ethics, or deep in the metaphysics of politics, or far-sighted 
in its political providence." He bestowed one of his characteristic sneers 
upon the doctrine that the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the 
Constitution— which, he said, made not the Constitution, but the discre- 
tion of the rulers, the measure of its powers. This was exactly Mr. 
Hayne's objection. The whole object of this disparagement of the con- 



16 

Even in that magnificent oration of 1830, in which he 
defended the supremacy of the Constitution against the Nul- 
lifies, and displayed its foundations in the principles of all 
sound political philosophy — that immortal speech, which so 
wrought into the Northern understanding the supreme value 
of the Union that the war for its preservation became, thirty 
years afterward, a possible success — even then he did not set 
liberty above the Union, or sever it from the Union, but he 
welded them together in that imperishable sentence which 
declares that " now and forever" they are "one and insepa- 
rable." Again and again did he say in Congress, in office, 
and on the hustings, that, while he would not consent to any 
further extension of slavery, he would do nothing, would con- 
sent to nothing, that should give the slave-holding States just 
cause to believe that their right to deal with slavery within 
their own limits, according to their own sovereign pleasure,, 
was in danger of being questioned. In short, there existed 
no ground whatever, in his public conduct prior to 1850, on 
which his Northern assailants could have rightfully expected 
him to yield one iota of recognition to their principles of 
determining his duty as a statesman in the dangerous crisis 
that culminated in that year. 

What that crisis was, the generation of Americans whom 
I wish especially to reach will need to take some pains to 
understand. Texas, an independent country of vast but 
undetermined extent, was in 1815 admitted into the Union 
as a slave-holding State; and admitted, too, under a compact 
which gave her a right at any future time to make out of her 
territory four other new States, with or without slavery, if 
formed south of the parallel of 36° 30', as the people of such 
new States might choose. This stipulation, forming a con- 
tract between the United States and the State of Texas, and 
formally consented to by Congress, had pledged the public 



stitutional doctrine maintained by Mr. Webster was to inculcate the idea 
that Massachusetts, guided by " the law of God," could nullify an act of 
Congress by a power reserved to her under the Constitution. (See the 
"Works of Theodore Parker," vol. i., pp. 198-201.) Mr. Parker was a 
good representative of the school of which he was a distinguished leader. 



17 

faith to its fulfillment. 1 Upper California, in 1846, when the 
news reached San Francisco that the United States had 
declared war against Mexico, had been seized by the forces 
of the United States; an immense immigration poured into 
it ; the treaty of peace transferred it to the United States ; 
and in 1850, no Territorial government having been provided 
for it by Congress, the State of California presented herself 
for admission into the Union, with a constitution prohibiting 
slavery. Still another great tract of country, comprehending 
what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, was ceded by 
the treaty of peace to the United States. There was no Afri- 
can slavery in any of these regions excepting Texas ; but the 
boundaries of Texas and New Mexico were as yet undefined, 
and their settlement in some way was absolutely imperative 
if the peace of the Union was to be preserved. 

These acquisitions of foreign territory had been made in 
the expectation and belief, entertained by the slave-holding 
interest, that they would afford the means of a large addition 
to the area of slavery, and so would increase the political 
power of the slave-holding States in the General Government, 
besides affording an outlet for their surplus African popula- 
tions. This policy of a further extension of slavery, as a 
means of defense against the aggressive tendencies of the North- 
ern anti-slavery agitations, was a great error on the part of 
the Southern men who devised and of the Northern men who 
assisted it. It introduced into the politics of the country an 
issue that should have been kept out of them, and one that 
rendered it exceedingly difficult for Northern conservatives 
to defend the just constitutional rights of the slave-holding 
States. The true policy of those States was a strictly defen- 
sive one, and not one that sought to be defensive by being 
aggressive. If slavery had been left where it was before the 
Mexican war was undertaken for the purpose of obtaining for 
it a new area, there was a reasonable certainty that the States 
in which it then existed would be left, under the guarantees 
and protection of the Constitution, to work out, in their own 

1 Mr. "Webster was not in Congress when Texas was admitted into the 
Union. 

2 



18 

time and mode, that gradual emancipation which an advanc- 
ing civilization would have demanded, and for which it 
would have found practical means, without endangering the 
constitutional autonomy of the States. But, while the North 
was growing richer and more powerful, and the South was 
becoming poorer and weaker, the fatal mistake was made by 
the South of regarding slavery not as a social evil but as a 
social advantage, and as an institution or condition to be 
defended, by increasing its political power in the Federal Gov- 
ernment, and by securing an enhanced value of slave-property 
through an extension of the regions in which it was supposed 
African slavery could be profitably employed. This mistaken 
policy helped to stake the whole question of future emanci- 
pation upon some convulsion that would make it a work of 
violence and bloodshed, instead of a peaceful and suitable 
legislation by those who should have retained the fate of the 
negro and of themselves in their own hands, and have treated 
emancipation as the joint interest of both master and slave. 
The tendencies and errors of this policy of extending the 
area of slavery were watched by Mr. Webster with the ut- 
most vigilance and anxiety. He clearly foresaw to what it 
was inevitably leading; and any one who wishes to pass a 
true judgment upon the means which he took to counteract 
it, must embrace in the survey what he could and did do before 
1850, and what he could and did do at and after that time. 

Prior to 1850, whenever and wherever he could do any- 
thing, he resisted every acquisition of territory into which 
slavery could be carried. Even his bitterest enemies have 
never found fault with his public conduct on the subject of 
slavery before 1850, but, on the contrary, they have exalted it 
to the skies in order to make his alleged apostasy from " the 
cause of freedom " the more damning. But when his efforts 
to prevent the success of the Southern policy of territorial ex- 
tension had been overborne by the Northern votes that might 
have defeated it, what remained for him to do in the crisis of 
1850, which he could do consistent^ with his known public 
principles and his duty as an American statesman ? Clearly 
there remained nothing whatever for him to do, excepting to 
leave the whole subject of slavery, so far as he could act upon 



19 

it, in a condition in which the chances for its peaceful extinc- 
tion would be at least enhanced, and possibly be secured 
against future accidents or disturbances. Before 1850, the 
means that he took to counteract the Southern policy were to 
resist all acquisitions of more territory. In 1850, the only re- 
maining duty that he could perform was to secure the country, 
in so far as he might, against the dangers of a disruption of 
the Union. There remained no mode in which this could be 
done, excepting to show that slavery had now reached its ut- 
most limits ; that all men of all sections must now cease to 
contend about it politically ; that where it existed it must be 
left, with such guarantees as the Constitution had given to it, 
for a peaceful extinction, if we were to escape its extinction by 
war and bloodshed. In the condition of the Union, therefore, 
in 1850, what Mr. Webster had to do could not be done, or 
attempted, without placing the whole existing controversy 
between the two sections exactly where he placed it on the 
7th day of March. 

That controversy, which raged with exceeding violence 
when Congress assembled in December, 1849, and through 
the greater part of the session, must be considered with refer- 
ence to some of the details of the situation — a situation that 
involved far greater hazards for the peace of the Union than 
any that had existed since the Constitution was established. 
In the first place, the admission of California as a free State 
was strenuously resisted by the South, and as strenuously in- 
sisted upon by the North. To secure her admission with the 
free constitution which the people of the State had chosen to 
make, was a point of the utmost importance to the North. In 
the second place, Territorial governments had to be provided 
for New Mexico and Utah, and this required a settlement of 
the boundaries between New Mexico and Texas. On the one 
hand, it was demanded by many northern representatives that 
the " AVilmot Proviso" — a restriction, that is to saj T , against 
the introduction of slavery — should be applied to the new Ter- 
ritories. This was violently opposed by Southern men, either 
because they believed that those Territories could profitably 
receive slave-labor, or because they regarded the restriction as 
an indignity to their section. To establish Territorial govern- 



20 

merits for New Mexico and Utah was another point of the ut- 
most importance. In the third place, a necessity had arisen 
for some new legislative provision for the execution ot that 
clause of the Constitution which required the surrender of 
persons held to labor by the laws of one State who had escaped 
into another. Some of the free States had passed laws making- 
it a penal offence for their own officers to render any aid in 
apprehending or securing fugitives from labor, and refusing 
the use of their jails as places of detention until a trial could 
be had. The feeling between the two sections on this subject 
had risen to an excitement which can hardly be understood 
but by those who lived through it, and which rendered a sober 
and proper settlement of all the other questions exceedingly 
difficult. Finally, there were many minor topics of crimina- 
tion and recrimination between the North and the South 
which did not come within the domain of Federal legislation, 
but which added further fuel to the flames of a dangerous con- 
troversy. As the session of Congress wore on, there came 
about an almost entire suspension of all business excepting 
that which related in some way to the all-absorbing topic of 
slavery. Day after day inflammatory speeches on the one 
side and the other were poured forth for the gratification of 
constituents, without one word being uttered that could tend 
to a practical solution of the difficulties or to the security of 
the public peace, until Mr. Clay came forward with his plan 
for adjusting them all in one settlement. In the midst of 
these sectional clamors, three things w r ere apparent to Mr. 
Webster : First, that if this session of Congress were allowed 
to pass by without a final settlement of every question in rela- 
tion to slavery on which Congress could legitimately act, the 
peace of the country would be left exposed to great hazard. 
Secondly, that to draw the line between measures on which 
Congress could legitimately act and matters wdiich must be 
remitted to the domain of public sentiment, was, in the exist- 
ing state of things, essential to the accomplishment of any 
good. In regard to measures, what Mr. Webster had to do 
w r as to point out the practical course by which the legislation 
could be so shaped that both sections of the Union could gain 
what it was for their mutual interest to gain, without the loss 



21 

of anything by either which it was for its interest to save. In 
regard to matters of mere feeling, he considered it his duty, 
while treating the opposite sections with absolute impartial- 
ity, to tell each of them plainly what it needed to modify 
or correct. Finally, it w r as apparent to him that, if this ses- 
sion of Congress could be made to terminate with a final set- 
tlement of all the slavery questions on which Congress had any 
remaining power to act, no further political question concern- 
ing slavery could thereafter arise to disturb the relations of 
the two sections. The Missouri Compromise line of 1820, 
the repeal or disturbance of which was not to be anticipated, 
had settled that freedom was to be the condition of all terri- 
tory north of the parallel of 36° 30' which had been acquired 
from France. The problem now was, how to treat the terri- 
tory which had been acquired from Mexico. When that ques- 
tion had been settled the limits of slavery would be fixed, 
and it would remain in its limited sphere, for that gradual 
extinction to which the earlier patriots of both sections had 
looked forward, when they provided for such guarantees and 
recognitions as they gave to it in the Federal Constitution. 
To gain the assent of Northern and Southern men to some 
safe basis on which to rest a settlement of this whole diffi- 
culty, was the object of the speech of the Tth of March. 

Mr. Webster, in this speech, took his stand upon the prop- 
osition that, at that moment, there was not a foot of land 
within the United States, or any Territory of the United 
States, the character of which, as free territory or slave terri- 
tory, was not then fixed by some law, and some irrepealable 
law, beyond the power of the action of the Federal Govern- 
ment. He proved this as to Texas by the compact wdiich had 
admitted her into the Union as a slave State, with a right to 
create out of her territory four other new slave States south 
of 36° 30'. He proved it as to all the remaining territory by 
the condition of the country, wdiich could not sustain slave- 
labor, and which was therefore fixed, so far as it could ever 
be occupied at all, for freedom, by a physical law which he 
said was superior to all human enactments. This, he said, 
rendered it unnecessary to apply to this region the restriction 
of the " Wilmot Proviso," which he declared he would not 



22 

apply under circumstances in which the South would regard 
it as an indignity. Now, it is a little remarkable that this 
wise, comprehensive, practical, and statesman-like view of the 
whole subject should not have at once commanded the assent 
of all Northern men who did not wish to keep up an endless 
sectional controversy. Every word that Mr. Webster said 
about it was absolutely true. The " Wilmot Proviso " could 
not be applied to any part of Texas, nor could Congress 
change the compact with her without a breach of the public 
faith. The Proviso did not need to be applied to New Mex- 
ico, and it could be applied there only as an abstraction. 
Mr. Webster took great pains to inform himself of the 
condition of that country, and we now know that he was en- 
tirely right when he pronounced it, from physical causes, in- 
capable of becoming a slave-holding Territory or State. The 
same thing was true of Utah. 

Here, however, was the gravamen of one of the charges 
brought against him : that he had abandoned a vast country 
to slavery ; had derided the principle of the " Wilmot Provi- 
so " ; and had gone over to the South, in the base hope of being 
made President as a reward for his apostasy from " the cause 
of freedom." I greatly doubt if posterity will take this view 
of his conduct. Fair-minded men, who may hereafter make 
an intelligent study of this part of our political history, with 
feelings unaffected by the passions and prejudices of our time, 
will do Mr. Webster the justice that was denied to him by 
many of his contemporaries. They will see that, as to Texas, 
he was absolutely right ; that, as to the remaining territory, it 
was safe, proper, and sufficient for him to rely upon the natu- 
ral laws that excluded slavery ; that, as to the " Wilmot Pro- 
viso," he not only never abandoned it, but he gave to it all 
the value it ever had, when he declared, as he did with great 
force, that, wherever there was a substantive good to be done, 
wherever there was a foot of land to be prevented from be- 
coming slave-territory, he was ready to assert the principle of 
the exclusion of slavery ; and that it was wise and becoming 
for him, as a man whose words were of weighty import to the 
welfare of his country, to add that he would not do a thing 



23 

unnecessarily that would wound the feelings of others, or that 
would discredit his own understanding. 

But perhaps the most virulent of all the assaults that were 
made upon Mr. Webster on account of his political conduct,, 
from the 7th of March, 1850, to the time of his death, was that 
which related to his support of the so-called " Fugitive-Slave 
Law." It is undoubtedly true that many persons were sincere- 
ly pained by what he said and did on this subject, who were 
not disposed to take any part in the efforts of his enemies to 
do him injury. But it is equally true that both classes— both 
the Abolition agitators and those who were not in any S3nse 
unfriendly to him — did him injustice: the one by gross mis- 
representation, and the other by not duly considering the 
obligations that rested upon him and all other Northern men 
who meant to fulfill their constitutional duties. The people 
of the South were unquestionably entitled to have an efficient 
law enacted by Congress for the execution of the extradition 
clause of the Constitution. There was no possible escape 
from the obligation of that clause, excepting to take refuge in 
the doctrine of the Abolition school, that it could be nullified 
by "the law of God," or by the alleged reserved right of the 
States to determine the powers of the Constitution. If there 
had ever been a time when that clause could have been con- 
strued as devolving on the States the duty of making the ex- 
tradition, that time had long gone by. The law that was 
enacted by Congress in 1793, and that was signed by Wash- 
ington, had been acquiesced in by the whole country, and had 
been executed, until several of the Northern States, stimulated 
by the Abolitionists, had forbidden their own officers to aid in 
its execution. When this had occurred, the Supreme Court 
of the United States, in 1842, pronounced the law of 1703 to 
be a discharge of a duty exclusively devolved upon the General! 
Government by the Constitution. 1 But this law relied for its 
execution on State magistrates, as well as on the judges of 
the Federal courts ; and when several of the States had for- 
bidden their magistrates, under severe penalties, to be con- 
cerned in its execution upon fugitives from labor, while they 

1 Prigg vs. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 16 Peters' R., 539. 
Mr. Justice Story delivered the opinion of the Court. 



24 

left them at liberty to act in the extradition of fugitives from 
justice — making thus a distinction invidious against the 
slave-holder — it became necessary to increase the number of 
Federal magistrates for the execution of this duty. It became 
necessary also to regulate by new provisions the evidence that 
the master was to produce in support of his demand, in order 
that the identity of the person who had escaped, and his con- 
dition of servitude, might be duly proved. 

The great objections that were made against the law of 
1850, aside from those which were urged by men who in- 
tended that the Constitution should not be executed by any 
law whatever, were, that it did not provide for any trial by 
jury, but left the question of personal liberty to be decided by 
a magistrate called a " commissioner: " and that the evidence 
which was to support the demand could be manufactured, in 
the slave State from which the alleged fugitive was said to 
have escaped. It does not concern the present purpose to 
discuss the reasonableness of these objections ; but the degree 
of Mr. Webster's responsibility as a legislator for any of the 
details of the law of 1850 is proper to be here stated with 
precision. 

"When he made his speech on the 7th of March, a bill on this 
subject, prepared by Mr. Mason, of Virginia, was before the 
Senate. Mr. "Webster, in the course of some strong but en- 
tirely dispassionate remarks concerning the obligation of the 
free States to consent to the faithful execution of this clause 
of the Constitution, and the necessity for further legislation, 
announced his purpose to support Mr. Mason's bill. Mr. 
Mason's bill did not contain any provision for a trial by 
jury, and it did contain provisions as to the mode of proof, 
which made it obnoxious to many persons. Mr. "Webster was 
afterward charged with as much responsibility for what the 
bill, when enacted into a law, did and did not contain, as if he 
had been its author. The charge was grossly unjust. What 
he said about the bill was in these words : 



" As it now stands, the business of seeing that these fugitives are de- 
livered up resides in the power of Congress and the national judicature ; 
and ray friend at the head of the Judiciary Committee has a bill on the 



^0 

subject now before the Senate, which, with some amendments to it. I 
propose, to support, with all its provisions, to the fullest extent." 

This was a clear statement of his purpose to amend Mr. 
Mason's bill ; and it is a well-known fact that Mr. Webster 
had prepared a bill of his own, containing, among other 
things, a provision for a trial by jury. This bill he presented 
to the Senate on the 3d of June. Mr. Mason's bill had not 
then been acted upon. On the 23d of July Mr. Webster be- 
came Secretary of State, under President Fillmore, who had 
succeeded to President Taylor, who died on the 10th. Mr. 
Mason's bill did not pass the Senate while Mr. Webster was a 
member of that body. 

But then, Mr. Webster " supported " the law after it had 
been passed — called upon the people to obey it, and did 
everything that he could do, officially and unofficially, to se- 
cure its execution. What else could he do ? Was he to join 
those who maintained that a statute could be nullified by 
" the law of God " ? The men who carried on that kind of 
agitation forgot that society can have no rule of administrative 
action but that which is ordained by civil authority, and that 
" the law of God," interpret it as we may, can be adminis- 
tered by civil tribunals only when it is in some way a part 
of the law of the land. Or, was Mr. Webster to join those 
who denounced this statute as unconstitutional, because it did 
not provide for a trial by jury, but committed the question of 
servitude and of personal identity to the decision of a single 
officer? The law was not unconstitutional for that reason, or 
for any other, if the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachu- 
setts, presided over by one of the greatest judges that Amer- 
ica has ever produced, was a competent authority to pass 
upon the question. In the first case that arose in New Eng- 
land (at Boston, in April, 1851), in which the law was fully 
executed, the Commissioner heard arguments against the con- 
stitutional validity of the law, running through several days. 
After he had rendered his decision and had signed the war- 
rant of extradition, Chief-Justice Shaw, then presiding over 
the full bench of the State court, sent to him a personal 
request that he would delay its execution until the court 
could hear an application for a habeas eot'jnts, for which a 



26 

petition had been presented by the counsel for the fugitive. 
The request was complied with, and the Marshal was in- 
strncted to wait the decision of the court. • 

The counsel of the prisoner were then heard in the State 
court on all the objections to the law that they wished to 
urge, and they acquitted themselves of their duty with great 
learning and ability. The Chief Justice afterward pronounced 
the unanimous decision of the court, that the law was free 
from constitutional objection. Then, and not until then, the 
extradition took place. 1 

Let the reader now take a map of the United States, and 
draw a cordon around the area of slavery as it was ascer- 
tained by the settlement of the " Compromise Measures." He 
will see that this line, commencing on the Atlantic coast and 
running westerly by the northern boundaries of Delaware, 
Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, until it reaches the con- 
fluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, ascends the Mis- 
sissippi until it embraces the State of Missouri on the western 
side of that river, then passes due south by the western 

1 "He" (Sims, the fugitive) "was on trial nine days — arraigned be- 
fore a slave-act commissioner — and never saw the face of a judge or any 
judicial officer but once. Before he could be removed to slavery, it was 
necessary that the spirit of the Constitution should be violated — that its 
letter should be broken — that the laws of Massachusetts should be cloven 
down — its officers, its courts, and its people, treated with contempt. The 
Fugitive-Slave Bill could only be enforced by the bayonet." ("Works of 
Theodore Parker," vol. i., p. 67.) Perhaps it may be thought by some persons 
that it was unnecessary to have taken so much notice of Mr. Parker's utter- 
ances as I have done. But he was an active and contemporary witness of 
what took i)l ace in these occurrences ; his published works — bow extensively 
read I know not — are among the sources to which more or less attention 
may be paid in regard to facts as well as opinions. He was, moreover, 
a man of no inconsiderable reputation as a scholar, a preacher, and a 
thinker. It is, therefore, not unimportant to see how far he is a truthful 
or reliable witness to things occurring in his own immediate neighbor- 
hood, and in which he was in some sort an actor. In the volume of his 
works now before me there are three or four elaborate discourses, largely 
occupied with denunciations of the '' Fugitive-Slave Law." Yet he no- 
where refers to the fact that the Supreme Court of Massachusetts — a per- 
fectly independent and a very eminent tribunal — pronounced the law to 
be constitutional. The decision may be found in the 7th Cushing's R., 
p. 285. 



27 

boundaries of Missouri and Arkansas until it strikes the 
northern boundary of Texas, and then passes around Texas, 
as the western limits of that State were ascertained by the 
settlement of 1850, until it reaches the Gulf of Mexico at the 
mouth of the Tlio Grande. The States, therefore, in which 
slavery then existed and to which it was confined, were Dela- 
ware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, 
Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, 
Arkansas, and Texas. Of these thirteen States, the first six 
were original parties to the establishment of the Constitution ; 
the remaining seven had been since admitted into the Union 
as slave States under all the guarantees and provisions of the 
Constitution, on an equal footing with all the other members; 
and one of the seven — Texas — had been admitted as a slave 
State on the same footing, with an additional right to make 
four more slave States south of the parallel of 36° 30', which 
had made it possible to increase the whole number of slave 
States to seventeen, although, as the event proved, Texas 
never availed herself of this right. "With regard to the con- 
dition of all the territory of the United States lying outside 
of these thirteen slave States, and then the property of the 
United States, slavery was excluded by the Missouri settle- 
ment from all the region of country north of 36° 30' that had 
been ceded to the United States by France at the time of the 
Louisiana purchase. From all the territory ceded by Mexico 
to the United States African slavery was excluded, by the 
natural incapacity of the country to make it a profitable form 
of labor, or to afford any inducement to extraordinary efforts 
for its introduction. The area of slavery was therefore ascer- 
tained by the settlement of 1850 ; and if, thereafter, no efforts 
should be made to repeal or disturb the Missouri settlement 
of 1820-21, slavery could advance no further. It was thus 
left in a circumscribed condition, with no outlet in any direc- 
tion — left to be operated upon by those causes which could be 
reasonably expected, in the process of time, to lead to its- 
peaceful extinction. But in order that those causes might 
operate freely — in order that their operation might be left 
with those whose interest it was to give effect to them as fast 
as prudence and the welfare of all would allow, it; was essen- 



28 

tial that the stipulated constitutional right of the individual 
slave-holder to demand a return of the fugitive from labor, 
should be admitted and made practically secure. So long as 
this right existed as a constitutional provision, and so long as 
it was practically denied, the denial was a cause of irritation, 
which could not but operate to prevent the slave-holding 
States from considering or acting upon measures for the ame- 
lioration or final extinction of a bondage that was bad for all 
who were affected by it. ISTo calm observer, who lived through 
the period from 1830 to 1850, could fail to see how the South- 
ern sentiment concerning slavery was changed by the anti- 
slavery agitation that brought about an unwillingness in the 
North to comply with constitutional requirements. After 
giving all the weight that should be given by considerate his- 
tory to the effect on Southern sentiment of the introduction 
and vast expansion of the cotton culture, there remains a 
great influence in the wrong direction, to be ascribed to those 
who conducted the Abolition agitations in the North. I say, 
therefore, that Mr. Webster, who had always deprecated this 
unfortunate and unnecessary influence upon the Southern feel- 
ing in regard to slavery, was actuated by wise, far-seeing, and 
correct motives, when he regarded the fulfillment of the con- 
stitutional stipulation for the return of fugitives as essential 
to the security of the only condition in which the master could 
begin to contemplate the natural rights of the slave and his 
own best interests. Southern opinion about slavery was in a 
wrong state, produced by causes that were extremely powerful, 
for one of which the North was solely responsible. Was it best 
to aggravate the operation of these causes, or was it best to re- 
move all of them that could be removed ? It seemed, and it 
was, a great individual hardship, that a man who had escaped 
from a bondage into which he was born, to a community where 
such bondage was unknown, should be carried back ; but, as 
the slavery of the African race stood in the South in 1850, 
and looking at the only possible mode in which its ameliora- 
tion or extinction by peaceful means could then be hoped for, 
it was undoubtedly, in any comprehensive view of the subject, 
for the present and the ultimate interest of the great body of 
the colored race that the constitutional stipulation for the 



29 

return of fugitives should be faithfully fulfilled. All could 
not escape ; the majority could not escape ; the great mass 
must remain. The Abolition leaders used to boast of the 
numbers that were run off by " the underground railroad."' 
ISTo doubt they were considerable ; but every one that was 
thus deported, and was not returned, helped to tighten the 
bonds of his brethren who remained behind. This was a con- 
sideration which might well be regarded by any Northern 
statesman who felt the force of a plain constitutional provis- 
ion. A statesman who means to discharge his whole duty to 
mankind must often consent to that which, taken in its indi- 
vidual and separate instances, causes much suffering to inno- 
cent men. It is a great individual hardship to be pressed or 
conscripted into military service ; it is a great individual hard- 
ship to be killed in battle; it is a great individual hardship 
that men's necessities should oblige them to pursue occupa- 
tions dangerous to life or health : but do we therefore say 
that there shall be no compulsory military service, that men 
shall not be killed in battle, or be engaged in dangerous em- 
ployments ? 

It is necessary now for the reader to observe how the set- 
tlement of 1S50, as a means of putting an end to further sec- 
tional controversy on the subject of slavery, was frustrated ; 
and how the Union became again involved in new strifes and 
collisions, which ended in a civil war that drenched the land 
in blood, and entailed upon it a public debt which will burden 
it for ages yet to come. It is no part of my purpose to discuss 
at any length the question whether the removal of slavery, as 
a consequence or result of that war, was a boon too dearly pur- 
chased. On that topic, as well as on the methods that were 
taken for the immediate transformation of the emancipated 
slaves into voters, and all the consequences which that measure 
entailed upon the Southern States, I do not now propose to 
treat. My present object is to vindicate the memory of a states- 
man by whose influence the settlement of 1850 was largely 
promoted, and without whose aid it could not have been se- 
cured ; and in order to make that vindication, it is necessary 
to describe his motives and aims, viewed from the position in 
which he stood and acted, together with what he could lore- 



30 

cast for the future, iu contrast with those events and causes 
which produced, in 1861, the attempted secession of the South- 
ern States, the Civil War, and all its consequences. I am per- 
fectly aware that if Mr. Webster's course, in 1850 and after- 
ward, is to be rightfully imputed to a base desire to reach the 
presidency by concessions to the pro-slavery spirit of his time, 
it is quite easy to charge him with more or less responsibility 
for the subsequent further developments of the ultra claims 
of the South. 

But the rational question is, whether the imputation of the 
alleged motive for his course in 1850 is a just imputation ; and 
this question can be determined by candid men only by a fair 
and dispassionate understanding of his purpose in promoting 
the settlement of 1850, and by observing how that purpose 
became frustrated by causes which no man could then foresee, 
which no man was bound to anticipate, and for which he, of 
all men, should not be held responsible, both because they 
came into operation after he had been laid in his grave, and 
because those who contributed, on the one side and the other, 
to put them in operation, acted in disregard and defiance of 
the settlement which he advocated and secured in 1850. 

I have described the leading principles of the settlement 
in which Mr. Webster, in 1850, advised both sections to con- 
cur, as resting, in respect to the ascertained area of slavery, on 
the constitutional rights of the then slave-holding States, on 
the exclusion of slavery by the Missouri Compromise from all 
the territory of the United States acquired in the Louisiana 
purchase, and lying north of 36° 30', and on its exclusion from 
all the remaining territory derived from Mexico, by a law 
which he considered superior to all human enactments — the in- 
capacity of the country to sustain slave-labor. I maintain that 
he looked forward to the time when slavery, thus circum- 
scribed, could begin to be dealt with, by the people of the 
States in which it existed, for its amelioration and final ex- 
tinction ; and I further maintain that his anxiety to secure an 
efficient execution of the constitutional stipulation for the re- 
turn of fugitives was dictated both by a sense of constitutional 
obligation and by the conviction that it was essential in order 
to % bring about in the Southern States a disposition to consider 



31 

and act upon their own social condition, as a matter fully and 
practically acknowledged by the North to belong exclusively 
to the people whom it concerned. I do not hesitate to assert 
for him this motive, for it was a rational motive ; and in judg- 
ing of the conduct of such a statesman as Mr. "Webster, unless 
the evidence of bad motives is too strong for the suggestion of 
good ones, it is more reasonable to impute those which are 
pure and praiseworthy than it is to impute those which are 

the reverse. 

Passing on, then, from the settlement of 1850, the reader 
who carefully investigates the history of that time will find 
that, notwithstanding the efforts that were made in the 
North to produce a condition of public opinion which would 
show that the settlement was accepted as final, it was not so 
accepted by large masses of the people. The Democratic 
party, in general, so accepted it, and their public organs 
pledged them to maintain it. As for the residue of the people 
of the free States, they had become divided, before Mr. Web- 
ster's death, into several different factions, all of which, with 
the exception of that portion of the Whigs who adhered to 
the settlement of 1850 as final, rejected and denounced it. 
These consisted partly of a body of men, composed chiefly of 
lormer Whigs, who took for themselves the name of the Free- 
Soil party. Another party, calling themselves the Free De- 
mocracy, or, in the political nomenclature of the time, "Barn- 
burners," were seceders from the old Democratic party. Then 
there was another organization, calling itself the Liberty party, 
whose distinctive creed was a denial that the Constitution 
of the United States authorized or allowed slavery, or that it 
was even legal in any State. Out of these various elements, 
more or less fused together, there was formed a strong politi- 
cal, anti-slavery party, considerable in numbers, and large 
enough to hold the balance of political power in some of the 
Northern States. In this party there were leading men who 
remained nominally among the old Whigs, but who remained 
connected with that organization for the purpose of prevent- 
ing its nomination of Mr. Webster, or Mr. Fillmore, as its 
candidate for the presidency in 1852. In this they succeeded. 
The Baltimore Whig Convention nominated General Scott as 



32 

its candidate, but with a " platform " which the anti-slavery 
party regarded as " pro-slavery ; " nevertheless, General Scott's 
letter of acceptance, his personal surroundings, and many other 
circumstances, left it doubtful whether the settlement of 1850 
could really be regarded as having the support of the Northern 
Whigs as a political party. The result was that General 
Pierce, the candidate of the Democratic party, secured a suffi- 
cient number of electoral votes to be chosen President in the 
autumn of 1852. In the mean time the political anti-slavery 
party, gathering fresh accretions in consequence of the success 
of the Democrats, became more and more consolidated, and 
were ready to take advantage of any occurrence that would 
appear still more to identify the Democrats with the supposed 
interests and aims of the slave-holding South. The professed 
and official creed of this political anti-slavery party did not 
overstep the limits of the Constitution, inasmuch as they 
claimed that slavery was sectional, not national — belonging to 
the States, and not to the Federal Government. They aimed, 
therefore, as they said, to separate the nation from slavery, 
and leave it to the States which tolerated, it. But two things 
tended strongly to prevent the Southern people from con- 
fiding in this profession : first, that the leaders of this party 
perpetually and violently denounced the settlement of 1850, 
which had itself separated the nation from slavery, so far as 
was consistent with the Constitution; second, that they had a 
strong and active ally in this warfare in the "•moral" anti- 
slavery party, consisting of the Abolitionists, who limited 
themselves not at all by constitutional, but only by what they 
called " moral," restrictions ; who would not be satisfied until 
there was not a slave in America; and who declared that 
slaverv must come down " with a sreat crash," if it could be 
gotten rid of in no other way. 1 

1 "Now is the time (1854) to push and be active, call meetings, bring 
out men of all parties, all forms of religion! Agitate, agitate, agitate! 
Make a fire in the rear of the Government and the representatives. The 
South is weak, only united. The North is strong in money, in men, in 
education, in tbe justice of our great cause, only not united for freedom. 
Be faithful to ourselves, and slavery will come down; not slowly, as I 
thought once, but, when the people of the North say so, it shall come 



33 

In this condition of things events occurred which were 
certain to reopen, in Congress and in the country, the door 
which had been closed in 1850, and to precipitate the whole 
nation into a new sectional conflict. In an evil hour, a Demo- 
cratic Northern Senator — Mr. Douglas, of Illinois — took the 
lead in a proposal to remove the Missouri restriction, which 
was, as to the regions now constituting Kansas and. Nebraska, 
the corner-stone of the settlement of 1S50. That restriction 
had rested for thirty years as part of a compact made between 
the North and the South ; and in the settlement of 1850 it 
had been assumed, to be, as it was, a compact that could not 
in good faith be disturbed, inasmuch as its enactment as a 
fundamental and perpetual law was the chief consideration 
for which Missouri had been allowed to come into the Union 
as a slave State. 

It was now (1854) proposed by Mr. Douglas that this re- 
striction should be removed as an unconstitutional exercise of 
power by Congress ; so that, in effect, Kansas and Nebraska 
would be laid open to a struggle for occupation by pro-slavery 
or anti-slavery settlers, upon the theory that the settlers on 
the national domains ought to be regarded as having the sov- 
ereign right of shaping their social institutions as fully as if 
they were already a State. 1 It was a fatal day for the South, 
and for the peace of the Union, when Southern men accepted 
this repeal of the Missouri Compromise — tendered to them 
however, it must in justice be remembered, by a Northern 
Senator. Their acceptance of it was a fatal error, not only 
because it destroyed the settlement of 1850, but because it 
gave to the whole anti-slavery party of the North what they 
regarded as anew political Godsend, by furnishing them with 
the means of further political action on the whole subject of 

down with a great erasli ! " (" Works of Theodore Parker," vol. i., p. 433.) 
" I say the South is the enemy of the North. England is the rival of the 
North— a powerful rival, often dangerous; sometimes a mean and dis- 
honorable rival. Bat the South is our foe— far more dangerous, mean, 
and dishonorable." {Ibid., p. 355.) 

1 "Squatter sovereignty" was the cant political name for this absurd 
doctrine, which was as inconsistent with the constitutional relations of a 
Territory with Congress as it was with sound policy. 
3 



34 

slavery. The famous Dred Scott case soon followed. A ma- 
jority of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, in the vain hope that it was in their power to put an 
end to all strife between the two sections, decided, in 1857, 
that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit slavery 
in a "Territory." The effect of this in the North was just 
what all rational observers foresaw that it must be. It gave 
a new impulse to the consolidation of all the elements that 
had been for three years gathering into a Northern and sec- 
tional party ; and although the Democrats had sufficient re- 
maining force to elect Mr. Buchanan President in 1856, their 
party, which had, by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 
deprived itself of all opportunity to fall back and to rest upon 
the settlement of 1850, was swept out of power by the great 
sectional Northern organization which had come into the field 
as the Kepublican party, and which elected Mr. Lincoln in 1860. 
This portentous occurrence — the first election of a President 
of the United States on sectional issues, and by the votes of 
the free States alone — was produced by events that ought never 
to have been allowed to occur, and that never could have 
occurred if the settlement of 1850 had been adhered to. The 
madness of secession, as a remedy against the dangers with 
which the South thought itself threatened, soon followed the 
election of Mr. Lincoln. The first gun was fired on Sumter, 
and "the great crash" in which slavery was to go down, as 
the men of " moral ideas " hoped and believed, came sooner 
than even they had calculated. 

I have recounted these things as matters of history, because 
they show with great distinctness that Mr. Webster's course 
in 1850 was the true one. It was based upon the conviction 
that it was better to ascertain the fixed area of slavery, and 
leave it to the action of those whom it most concerned, for a 
final extinction, without an interference that could not be ex- 
erted within the limits of the Constitution, than it was to 
increase the hazards of secession by the Southern States as a 
means of maintaining their exclusive authority over it, there- 
by incurring the necessity of a war for the preservation of 
the Union. 

I now desire the reader to recur to the speech of the 7th 



35 

of March, 1850, and to note how calmly, and yet with what 
power, Mr. Webster explained to both sections how the area 
of slavery was then limited ; how plainly, bat how kindly, he 
told the people of the South that their feelings and opinions 
about slavery were not what the feelings and opinions of their 
fathers were, and how contrary to the just expectations of the 
North had been all the efforts and measures for its extension • 
how frankly he declared that he would assert the principle of 
the "Wilmot Proviso" whenever and wherever there should 
be any practical necessity for it, but that he did not propose 
to assert it as a mere taunt or reproach ; how grandly he re- 
buked the Southern spirit of secession, and how forcibly he 
displayed the impossibility of a peaceable separation of the 
States upon any line that the human imagination could con- 
ceive or that human ingenuity could draw. If, turning to the 
other side of the chapter, he told the North, with equal firm- 
ness, that the South had a constitutional right to the full exe- 
cution of the extradition clause of the Constitution, and that 
the Abolition societies and agitations had produced mischief, 
and only mischief, was it not all true ? When he told the 
State of Massachusetts that, while he would gladly pursue her 
instructions in any matter in which she had an interest of her 
own not adverse to the general interests of the country, he 
would not regard her instructions upon any question which 
equally affected the interests of all the States, did he say any- 
thing that did not become an American Senator ? Doubtless 
he said a great deal in this speech which was very unaccept- 
able to those whose minds were at a fever-heat of excitement, 
and who could not bear to be told that they were wrong. 
But is the whole of that unimpassioned and comprehensive 
advice, which he so calmly gave to both sections of the Union, 
to be read in after times as if it were nothing but a " bid " 
for the presidency, or an effort to storm the North and concil- 
iate the South in his own selfish interest ? If his object had 
been to do anything for either section at the expense of the 
other, he could easily have raised a " storm " from which nothing 
but the thunderbolts of civil war could have relieved the over- 
charged elements of the political atmosphere. He might have 
put himself at the head of all the anti-slavery forces of the 



36 

.North, and thus have precipitated the attempt to break up 
the Union which came ten years later, when he could no 
longer interfere for its safety. That he did not and would 
not do so, was his crime in the eyes of those who hated botli 
Union and Constitution for the sanction which they had given 
to slavery. In the judgments of another age it will be ac- 
counted to his glory that he aimed to preserve the Union for 
a better day, when slavery could be ended without civil con- 
vulsion and without blood. 

I have reserved to this connection one of the paragraphs 
of the speech which was most bitterly assailed by the professed 
friends of the negro, but which proves that Mr. Webster, as I 
have claimed for him, looked forward to peaceful emancipa- 
tion, after the settlement of 1850 should have secured the 
operation of causes by which it could be brought about. On 
this subject he expressed himself thus : 

" I have one other remark to make. In my observations upon slavery 
as it has existed in this country, and as it now exists, I have expressed no 
opinion of the mode of its extinguishment or melioration. I will say, 
however, though I have nothing to propose, because I do not deem myself 
so competent as other gentlemen to take any lead on this subject, that if 
any gentleman from the South shall propose a scheme to be carried on by 
this Government upon a large scale, for the transportation of free colored 
people to any colony or any place in the world, I should be quite disposed 
to incur almost any degree of expense to accomplish that object. Nay, 
sir, following an example set more than twenty years ago by a great 
man, then a Senator from New York (Rufus King), I would return to Vir- 
ginia, and through her to the whole South, the money received from the 
lands and Territories ceded by her to this Government for any such pur- 
pose as to remove, in whole or in part, or in any way to diminish or deal 
beneficially with, the free colored population of the Southern States. I 
have said that I honor Virginia for her cession of this territory. There 
have been received into the Treasury of the United States eighty millions 
of dollars, the proceeds of the sales of the public lands ceded by her. If 
the residue should be sold at the same rate, the whole aggregate will ex- 
ceed two hundred millions of dollars. If Virginia and the South see fit to 
adopt any proposition' to relieve themselves from the free people of color 
among them, or such as may be made free, they have my full consent that 
the Government shall pay them any sum of money out of the proceeds of 
that cession which may be adequate to the purpose." 

This suggestion was furiously denounced as one of the chief 
ingredients in Mr. Webster's " bid " for the votes of the South, 



37 

by the proposal of a plan for " the expatriation ot the free col- 
ored people from their native soil."' But what was the offer 
itself, and what did it contemplate ? We must transport our- 
selves back to the period when Mr. Webster was speaking and 
acting ; we must remember that plans looking to the emanci- 
pation of the colored people who still remained slaves could 
only be tentatively suggested in Congress by any Northern 
statesman ; that, as the Union then stood, any measure on the 
subject must originate with and be carried out only by each 
slave-holding State, with such collateral aid and encourage- 
ment as it was competent for the Federal Government to give ; 
and that the question of what was to be the status and the 
destiny of the freed men was inextricably interwoven with the 
question of emancipation. No one, outside of the circle of 
the xVbolitionists, looked forward to the possibility of a full 
political equality of whites and blacks in the States where 
slavery then remained ; nor did even the Abolitionists trouble 
themselves to afford any help upon the great problem of what 
was to follow the emancipation, for which they were so pas- 
sionately eager that they sought to break down all constitu- 
tional barriers in order to reach it. If, therefore, in that con- 
dition of a great and complicated subject, more difficult of 
wise treatment than any with which modern statesmanship 
has had to deal in any country — too vast for empirical reme- 
dies, too complex for the application of abstract principles, 
however true — Mr. Webster declared that he would consent 
to give back to Virginia two hundred millions of dollars, from 
the proceeds of a public domain which she had generously 
ceded to the Union, to enable her to deal beneficially with her 
free colored people, or with those who might be made free, what 
offence against humanity, or sound policy, or the interests of 
the negro race, did he commit ? Any one who duly considers 
his suggestion or offer, will see that it was the only thing 
within the compass of all the power of the Federal Govern- 
ment by which it could afford any aid whatever to future 
emancipation ; and that, as things then stood, Virginia was, of 
all the large slave-holding States, the one in which this aid 
•could have been practically extended. True, it contemplated 
deportation ; but compulsory deportation was no necessary 



38 

part of such a plan ; and even if it had been, it was in the 
power of Christian and philanthropic administration, with two 
hundred millions of money behind it, to do a thing of vast 
consequence to the interests of the colored race. Subsequent 
events have led the people of the United States to deal with 
these interests in another way ; but while we may all hope 
that the equality of American citizenship that has been con- 
ferred upon the colored people will prove a blessing to both 
races — a point that is not yet established — it would be folly 
to question the wisdom or the motive of a past statesmanship, 
which contemplated colonization in other lands of those to 
whom birth upon American soil had not then, as it now has, 
everywhere given all the political and civil rights that it gives 
to white men. 

It has been necessary for me, in vindicating the memory 
of Mr. Webster from an unjust imputation, to contrast his 
teachings and his public conduct with those of the radical 
Abolition leaders who assailed him, and who undoubtedly did 
contribute largely, by their assaults upon him specially, to 
prevent the settlement of 1850 from attaining that universal 
acceptance in both sections of the Union which would have 
put it beyond the possibility of being disturbed, because it 
would have rendered impossible the subsequent repeal of the 
earlier settlement known as the Missouri Compromise. The 
men who led the anti-slavery agitation from about 1834 to the 
time of President Lincoln's first election, were certainly re- 
markable men. No similar band of agitators ever succeeded 
better in divesting themselves not only of all charity, but of 
all power to judge righteously of the conduct of those whose 
sense of public duty was opposed to theirs. To say of them 
that they were unfair, is to use a term far too mild to compass 
the monstrous injustice toward others of which they were 
habitually guilty. They seem to have studiously disqualified 
themselves to understand that there could be purity of motive 
in those whose public conduct did not suit them. They had 
no toleration for that high loyalty to the Constitution, that 
scrupulous obedience to law, that fidelity to civil obligation, 
which are at once the glory of magistracy and the best secu- 
rity of a popular government. With them, every man who 



39 

did not submit himself to their dictation and accept their wild 
theories of government was bought by the " slave-power " 
with office or with money. They constituted themselves keep- 
ers of other mens' consciences, and endeavored to inflict the 
pains which it is the office of conscience to inflict upon itself. 
They knew nothing of that large consideration of the public 
o-ood which is involved in the firm execution of law because it 
is law. 

In the early part of their career they had been subjected 
to what they regarded as persecution. It taught them how 
the reputation of martyrdom secures a following, and they 
used it to array multitudes in support of their disorganizing 
theories. As they went on, they became aware of the power 
of violence in speech, of audacious and untruthful assertion, 
of the calumnious imputation of bad motives, and of the ex- 
travagance which disturbs and confounds all moral distinc- 
tions. Too impatient to await the slow but sure progress of 
society toward a better condition, they aimed directly and of 
purpose to bring about the immediate abolition of slavery, 
without regard to consequences or consideration of means. 
Some of them treated the South as if it were a hostile coun- 
try. 1 Nearly all of them taught that disunion was to be pre- 

1 " But here is a matter which the South may think of. In case of 
foreign war, the North will not he the battle-field. An invading army 
would attack the South. Who would defeud it— the local militia, the 
'chivalry' of South Carolina, the 'gentlemen' of Virginia, who are to 
slaughter a hundred thousand Abolitionists in a day ? Let an army set 
foot on Southern soil, with a few black regiments ; let the commander 
offer freedom to all the slaves, and put arms in their hands ; let him ask 
them to burn houses and butcher men : and there would be a state of things 
not quite so pleasant for ' gentlemen ' to look at." ("Works of Theodore 
Parker," vol. i., p. 426.) It seems almost incredible that such things should 
have been uttered and printed. They were not only uttered and printed, 
but they were carefully reprinted, and they stand on shelves of libraries 
to-day, in all the freshness of good type, fair paper, and comely binding. 
Mr. Parker's foul and indecent sermon on Mr. Webster was dedicated, in 
the new edition of 1853, to "The Young Men of America."— In another 
"Discourse," in 1852, speaking of the execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law 
by the administration of Mr. Fillmore, Mr. Parker said: "I wish I could 
find an honorable motive for such deeds; but hitherto no analysis can de- 
tect it, no solar microscope of charity can bring such a motive to light. 



40 

ferred to any union with slave-holders ; that revolution was bet- 
ter than slavery ; andj that no civil compacts or laws which 
recognized the bondage of the negro were of the slightest 
obligation upon him or any one else. 

Every political occurrence, therefore, which offered to 
them a real or a pretended cause for inflaming the Northern 
dislike of slavery, augmented the influence which they were 
constantly exerting to* bring about a state of things that would 
end in a dissolution of the Union. 1 To the accomplishment 
of this end they were powerfully assisted by another set of 
men in the South, who had learned to maintain slavery to be 
a kind of Divine institution. 

Great honor is now claimed for those who led the Northern 
•anti-slavery agitation for a period of about thirty years, as 

The end is base, the means base, the motive base." I do not know, in all the 
history of polemics or politics, a more singular self-stultification than this. 
A man of intelligence and culture, able, one would suppose, to survey the 
whole field of human motives, with the Constitution of the United States 
before him, and with all the facts before him which rendered its execution 
a public duty, professes himself to be unable to understand how the ad- 
ministrators of the Government could possibly have had an honorable 
motive for their acts. Even with his " solar microscope of charity " — such 
as it was — he could discover nothing but a sordid and mean desire to 
truckle to the South. The confession seems to imply great defect in the 
vision, or in the microscope; or, perhaps, the inquirer coidd not see what 
he did not wish to see. 

1 See the Resolutions adopted by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery So- 
ciety, at a meeting in Faneuil Hall, January 23-24, 1850, indorsing the Reso- 
lution of an anti-slavery convention held in Ohio in the previous Septem- 
ber, in the following words : " With full confidence in the integrity of our 
purpose and the justice of our cause, we do hereby declare ourselves the 
enemies of the Constitution, Union, and Government of the United States, 
and the friends of the new Confederacy of States, where there shall be no 
union with slave-holders, but where there shall ever be free soil, free 
labor, and free men ; and we proclaim it as our unalterable purpose and 
determination to live and labor for a dissolution of the present Union, by 
all lawful and just though bloodless and pacific means, and for the forma- 
tion of a new republic that shall be such not in name only, but in full 
living reality and truth. And we do hereby invite and entreat all our 
fellow-citizens, and the friends of justice, humanity, and true liberty 
throughout the Northern States, to unite with us in laboring for so glori- 
ous an object." 



41 

persons who, by their consistent and persistent pursuit of their 
ohject, accomplished j it is said, the abolition of slavery. That 
they had a large, a very large, agency in producing a state 
of things in which the South became more and more re- 
solved to maintain slavery ; that they exasperated sectional 
animosities until it became apparent that the issue of a civil 
war must determine that which should have been reached by 
far other means, cannot be denied. But so long as it remains 
true that the means by which an end is reached constitute an 
important moral element in judging the claims of individual 
actors, history w T ill have an account to settle with those who 
organized and conducted the Abolition societies of the North, 
and who, b}' their mode of attack upon slavery, produced in 
the South a determination to defend it at every hazard. Be- 
fore this agitation commenced in the North, public opinion in 
the South was beginning to consider the evils of slavery, and 
to inquire what could be done for its amelioration and final 
extinction. But all this was immediately checked, as soou as 
it was seen that there was to be an interference from the North 
with a matter that concerned the domestic and internal con- 
dition of the slave-holding States. There is no fact in Ameri- 
can history more certain than this ; and, moreover, it was 
just as plain to wise men, when the Northern agitation was 
but just begun, what would be its effect and its ultimate con- 
sequences, as what they have been is now plain to us. In a 
remarkably prophetic letter written by Dr. Channing to Mr. 
Webster in 1828, the result which we have seen was foretold. 
"My fear, 1 ' he said, "in regard to our efforts against slavery 
is, that we shall make the case worse by rousing sectional 
pride and passion for its support, and that we shall only break 
the country into two great parties, which may shake the foun- 
dations of government."' 1 It was Channing's conviction that 
the proper course for the people of the North to pursue was 
to manifest a willingness, in a true spirit of sympathy for a ca- 
lamity, to share the toil and expense of abolishing slavery, 
and that, without this manifestation, all Northern interference 
would be unavailing. But the Abolitionists soon put any such 

1 The letter may be found in vol. v. of Mr. Webster's "Works," at p. 366. 



42 

course out of the question. They chose to treat slavery not 
as the calamity but as the crime of the Southern people, and 
to attack the Constitution because it sanctioned that crime. 
The immediate and inevitable effect was that, in the eyes of 
the Southern people, slavery suddenly ceased to be a calamity, 
and became a blessing. Before there could be any considera- 
tion of means by which the Federal Government could afford 
collateral aid to emancipation, Southern sentiment about 
slavery was completely changed. The efforts for its further 
extension and the increase of its political power, however 
unwise, followed as natural results. In weighing, therefore^ 
the honor that is to be accorded in history to the Abolition 
leaders, so far as the removal of slavery is to be regarded as 
their work, its removal is to be placed in one scale, and a civil 
war, with the loss of a million lives and the accumulation of a 
mountain of public debt, is to be placed in the other. If we 
go back from 1860 to 1830, aud suppose that the North had 
so acted as to follow aud assist, in a kindly spirit, such meas- 
ures as some of the Southern States might easily have adopted 
for gradual emancipation, if the slave-holders had not been 
persecuted as criminals, all the money that the Federal Gov- 
ernment could have expended, in a period sufficient to have 
seen the final end of slavery, would not have amounted to 
a quarter part of the cost of the late war, and not a single 
drop of blood need have been added to the money ; more- 
over, no national debt, of any serious amount or considerable 
duration, need have been incurred. 1 

1 " Gradual emancipation " — a term that used to excite the special wrath 
and scorn of our Abolitionists — comprehended two ideas: As applied to 
the measures that might be taken in any one slave-holding State, it implied 
a system of freeing those born after a certain period ; as applied to the 
whole mass of slavery in all the slave-holding States, it implied a com- 
mencement, in one or more separate States, of measures for emancipation, 
for which such State or States were better prepared and more favorably 
situated than others. Both of these ideas might have become practical, if 
the slave-holders everywhere had not been attacked from the North as 
men guilty of a sin that was repeated every day and every hour that they 
continued to deliberate upon what they could or ought to do. It should 
not be forgotten that this attack began and had been carried on for nearly 
fifteen years, befjre the annexation of Texa?; and the Mexican War, were 



43 

There could not be a more forcible illustration of the mis- 
take — to call it by no stronger term — which was made by the 
anti-slavery agitators at the beginning of their efforts, and 
always persisted in, than is afforded by the recently-published 
autobiography and memoirs of Harriet Martineau. This lady, 
in some respects a very remarkable woman, who had some 
statesman-like qualities united with a due share of feminine 
weaknesses, came to this country in 1834, when she was at the 
age of thirty-four. How she fell, at the latter part of her visit, 
into the society and under the influence of the Abolition leaders, 
and became their most powerful English ally and agent, may 
be learned from her own account, supplemented by her Ameri- 
can biographer, Mrs. Chapman. She came here, of course, 
with strong feelings against slavery, but with no special asso- 
ciations with those who were then organizing the anti-slavery 
agitation in the Northern States of this Union. These persons 
were then undergoing what they have always considered as 
their great trial, in consequence of a state of the popular feel- 
ing which neither they nor she ever rightly understood, or for 
which, if they ever understood it, none of them have ever 
rightly accounted. Perhaps it was not to be expected that 
persons who were at first made objects of more or less unjusti- 
fiable popular violence, or social ostracism, on account of their 
opinions and utterances concerning slavery, should have taken 
much pains to account for the odium in which they were for 
a time held. Of the fact of that odium, and of its occasional 
manifestations in very improper ways, there can be no denial. 

undertaken for the purpose of creating new defences of slavery against 
Northern aggression. 

In 1833-34 it cost the British Government, in compensation to the 
masters, £20,000,000, or $100,000,000, to emancipate all the slaves in all 
their colonies. In 1830, the slaves in the United States numbered a little 
over two millions, of all ages and both sexes. Rating their average value 
at $300 per head — which would have been a very liberal ; llowanee in the 
purchase of freedom for a large mass of such a population — and assuming 
that a measure of emancipation similar to that adopted by the Impe- 
rial Parliament had been put in operation in this country at about the 
same period, the cost would have been $600,000,000. The mere money- 
cost of our late Civil War, to the Federal Government alone, was over 
$4,000,000,000. 



44 

But to believe that it had no other root than a sordid com- 
mercial spirit, or a demoralization of American society, brought 
about by an original compromise with a great wrong, was to take 
a very shallow view of the matter, which so intelligent and sa- 
gacious a person as Miss Martineau should not have adopted. 
I am speaking here not of the Southern but of the Northern 
feeling toward the Abolitionists, at the period of Miss Marti- 
neau's visit. That feeling was caused by an instinctive con- 
viction, shared by nearly all classes, that the Union was im- 
perilled by the anti-slavery agitation, as it had been begun and 
was conducted ; that this agitation could not go on here, in 
the free States, without producing, sooner or later, a territorial 
and sectional civil war ; that a peaceful emancipation of the 
Southern slaves, brought about by this kind of Northern inter- 
ference, was out of the question ; and that we of the North 
were not called upon, by any duty that we owed to the sub- 
jects of that bondage, to break up and destroy our national 
Constitution, at the risk of what might be made to take its 
place after a separation of the free from the slave States. This 
conviction w r as a sound and wholesome one. As a moral in- 
stinct it was perfectly right, for no just reason could be assigned 
that could make it our duty to imperil our institutions, our 
own welfare, and the welfare of our children's children, in an 
attempt to force immediate emancipation upon the South, on 
the ground that slave-holding was a sin. But it often hap- 
pens that a perfectly right popular sentiment will express it- 
self in wrongful acts. It did so in this instance, in ways that 
were not only impolitic, but that could be complained of as 
violations of the rights of free speech. 

When Miss Martineau tirst came here, without concealing 
in private any of her opinions or feelings about slavery, she 
wisely kept herself free from the influence of all cliques. She 
traveled extensively in the South, and did not conceal her 
views of slavery there any more than in the North ; and it 
stands upon her own written declaration that no efforts were 
made to bias her mind in favor of the " institution," while the 
fullest opportunities were given to her to observe its condi- 
tion, its workings, and to understand the feelings of the mas- 
ters. It happened that in Charleston she was the guest of a 



45 

Unitarian clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Gilman, who had a brother- 
in-law in Boston, Mr. Ellis Gray Loring, then, and until his 
death, oue of the foremost leaders of the Abolitionists. Mr. 
Gilman wrote to Mr. Loring in the most enthusiastic terms of 
Miss Martineau's personal qualities, and expressed the hope 
that Mr. and Mrs. Loring would become acquainted with her. 
The steps taken by Mr. Loring to commit Miss Martineau to 
the cause and the organization which he had so much at heart 
were so characteristic, that many who remember that gentle- 
man will recognize his zeal and his methods. He wrote a 
lone; letter to Miss Martineau, who was still in the South, 
warning her that great efforts would be made to blind her to 
the true character of slavery, and to prejudice her against the 
" fanaticism and indiscretion of the anti-slavery party," and 
begging her to suspend her opinion of the anti-slavery meas- 
ures and men till she could look at them for herself. He end- 
ed by inviting her to become his guest when she should return 
to Boston. This letter reached her while she was staying at 
Mr. Clay's, in Louisville, May 27, 1835. Accepting the prof- 
fered hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Loring, she replied to the 
main topic of his letter as follows : 

" We shall speud many a half-hour in talking over the principal subjects 
of your letter. It is too copious a one to he entered upon now, but I can- 
not honestly let you suppose that I agree with you in thinking that there 
has been any attempt, or wish, to blind me as to the real state of things at 
the South. I have been freely shown the notoriously bad plantations, he- 
cause they were bad, and have been spontaneously told a great number of 
dreadful facts, which might just as well have been kept from me if there 
had been any wish to deceive me. I have seen every variety of the poor 
creatures, from the cheerful, apt house-servant, to the brutish, forlorn, 
wretched beings that crawl along the furrows of the fields. The result has 
been a full confirmation of the horror and loathing with which I have ever 
regarded the institution, and a great increase of the compassion I have al- 
ways felt for those who are born to the possession of slaves— a compassion 
which has something of respect mingled with it, when I see them perse- 
cuted by a foreign interference, which is now the grand hinderance to their 
freeing themselves from their intolerable burden. How Christians can ex- 
asperate one another under the pressure of so weary a load of shame and 
grief, I can scarcely understand; and I have been fancying, all through the 
1 Southern States, how, if Jesus himself were to rise up amidst them, he 
would pour out his compassion and love upon those who are afflicted with 



46 

an inheritance of crime. If his spirit were in us all, the curse would be 
thrown off in a day ; and, as it is, I am full of hope that the day of liberty 
is rapidly approaching, notwithstanding the mutual quarrels of Coloniza- 
tionists and Abolitionists, and the hard thoughts which the friends and 
masters of the slaves entertain of each other. The reasons of my hope, 
my confidence, I will tell you when we meet." 

After her return to Boston she was warily induced to at- 
tend a ladies' anti-slavery meeting, to which she was escorted 
by Mr. Loring from his own house. She came to the meet- 
ing without the slightest warning of what was to happen to 
her, and without any purpose but to learn, as a silent ob- 
server, what her anti-slavery friends were aiming at, and how 
they handled their subject. In the course of the proceed- 
ings Mr. Loring passed to her a slip of paper on which he had 
penciled these words, the purport of which was immediately 
whispered through the room : 

" Knowing your opinions, I just ask you whether you would, object to 
give a word of sympathy to those who are juffering here for what you 
have advocated elsewhere. It would afford great comfort. 1 ' 

She says, in her autobiography, that the moment of reading 
this note was one of the most painful of her life ; and Mrs. 
Chapman tells us that the touch of pain and displeasure which 
passed over Miss Martineau's face was more severe than she 
ever saw on any other human countenance. Well it might 
be. She was caught. If she had remained silent, her silence 
would have been instantly regarded and treated as a proof 
that her sentiments about slavery were not wholly sound. In 
this dilemma, suppressing her pain and displeasure by a se- 
vere effort, she rose, and said, with an evident tone of re- 
proach : 

" I have been requested, by a friend present, to say something, if only 
a word, to express my sympathy in the objects of this meeting. I had 
supposed that my presence here would be understood as showing my sym- 
pathy with you. But, as I am requested to speak, I will say what I have 
said through the whole South, in every family where I have been : that I 
consider slavery as inconsistent with the law of God, and as incompatible 
with the course of his providence. I should certainly say no less at the 
North than at the South concerning this utter abomination ; and I now 
declare that in jour principles I fully agree." 



47 

She herself tells us that she involuntarily emphasized the 
word " principles," because she then regarded the methods of 
her anti-slavery friends as objectionable — an opinion which she 
afterward changed.. But what she said was enough for those 
who had led her into this step. Her remarks were taken 
down and accurately published in Mr. Garrison's Liberator. 
The occurrence enabled the Abolitionists to claim Miss Mar- 
tineau as theirs, and it put her into a false position with all 
the rest of American society. The natural effect upon her 
of what followed this affair — the displeasure and vexation of 
other circles — was to make her at one with her anti-slavery 
friends in all their opinions, feelings, and acts ; or, as Mrs. 
Chapman puts it, " she came to see things as they were." 
Seeing things as they were, meant that she finally went home 
to England thoroughly indoctrinated with the Abolitionist 
belief that all the statesmen of America were corrupted by 
the influences of slavery ; that the general tone of American 
society was debased by craven fears ; and that all the wisdom, 
virtue, ability, courage, patriotism, and true nobility of soul 
that America could boast, were concentrated in the persons 
of the anti-slavery agitators. At the end of more than forty 
years, we have the story of that meeting related by herself 
and Mrs. Chapman with infinite naivete, as if it were a per- 
fectly undesigned occurrence, an unpremeditated accident. 
ISTay, we learn that Mr. Loring — and it can be easily credited 
— called upon her after the meeting, and, in terms of great 
mortification and sorrow, expressed his regret for the uninten- 
tional injury which he had done ; that she accepted his pro- 
testations, and soothed his wounded feelings by telling him 
that the responsibiliy was hers at bottom ! 

What would she have thought if a similar device had been 
resorted to in Charleston, to draw her into the public expres- 
sion of opinions favorable to the slave-holders and against 
the Abolitionists — which she certainly did hold, and which she 
expressed in her private letter to Mr. Loring. 

That letter, be it observed, was written at the house of Mr. 
Clay, in Louisville ; and in it she tells Mr. Loring emphatically 
that there has been no effort to blind her about slavery. But 
in her autobiography, written in 1855, there is a passage which, 



5) 



48 

shows that the papers which came into the hands of Mrs. 
Chapman ought to have been more carefully edited, for she 
declares that Mr. Clay " was daily endeavoring, at his daugh- 
ter's house or his own, to impress me in favor of slavery 
(Vol. i., p. 344.) Similar contradictions of herself, in many 
instances, might be pointed out, if it were worth while. 

But let the statesmen of America be left for a moment out 
of consideration, as persons whose political relations might 
possibly have blinded them ; and let us accompany Miss Mar- 
tineau in her intercourse with one of her own sex — a woman 
who was in no way her inferior in wisdom, not far her infe- 
rior in intellect and cultivation, and fully her equal in all 
goodness, religious principle, and benevolence. 

Catharine Sedgwick was the daughter of one of the ablest 
and purest of the Northern trainers of the Constitution of the 
United States. If any woman in America could claim to 
know and be able to instruct a foreigner of her own sex in 
what consisted the moral justification for the terms on which 
the Union was formed in 1787, and what was the necessity 
for its preservation, it was Miss Sedgwick. Now, from Miss 
Martineau herself (writing in 1855) we have the following 
account : 

" I remember Miss Sedgwick starting back in the path, one day when 
she and I were walking beside the sw r eet Honsatonic, and snatching her 
arm from mine, wheu I said, in answer to her inquiry, what I thought 
the issue of the controversy must be. ' The dissolution of the Union ! ' 
she cried. ' The Union is sacred, and must be preserved at all cost.' My 
answer was, that the will of God was sacred, too, I supposed ; and if the 
will of God — which, as she believed, condemned slavery — should come into 
collision with the Federal Constitution which sanctioned it, the only ques- 
tion was, Which should give way— the Divine will, or a human compact? 
It did not appear to me then, any more than it does now, that the disso- 
lution of the Union need be of a hostile character. That the elimination 
of the two pro-slavery clauses from the Constitution must take place 
sooner or later, was always clear to me ; but I do not see why the scheme 
should not be immediately and peaceably reconstituted, if the Americans 
will but foresee the necessity in time." ' 

1 Miss Martineau, in her characteristic mode of setting down everybody 

who differed from her, speaks of the "American timidity" with which 

-the Sedgwicks "worshiped the parchment-idol — the Act of Union." She 



49 

Here, then, we have the American woman of high culture, 
intelligence, and conscientiousness, expressing, in 1836, the 
national conviction that, above all things, the Union must be 
preserved, and that the supposed conflict between the Federal 
Constitution and " the will of God " must be disposed of by 
other means than a dissolution of the Union, which certainly 
could not be peaceable, and which could afford no reasonable 
probability that " the will of God " would be worked out in 
that way. On the other hand, we have the English woman 
of very high intelligence and culture, but with a cold and 
scholastic logic, assuming two things : first, that the conflict 
between "the will of God" and the human compact must 
produce the dissolution of the compact ; and secondly, that 
its dissolution could be peaceable. Which of these two women 
was right ? We have had " the irrepressible conflict " worked 
out ; and the question, Which of these two opinions was right % 
is solved by a bitter experience that has demonstrated the value 
of all such anterior speculative logic as Miss Harriet Marti- 
neau's. That there never was, or could be, a time when the 
dissolution of our Union could be peaceable, she should have 

never qualified herself to understand the grounds of that attachment to 
the Constitution of the United States which she stigmatized as worship 
of a parchment-idol. The phrase which she applied to it shows that she 
took it to be something like the Act of Union between England and Scot- 
land. Hence she probably supposed that no more was involved in a disso- 
lution of our Union than would be involved in a mutual agreement of the 
people of those kingdoms to sever the two crowns and to restore the 
Scottish Parliament. If she had tried to understand how the Federal 
Government is the agent and trustee for the exercise of certain powers of 
a national description, ceded to it in full sovereignty by the people of the 
several States ; how the destruction of that Government would effectually 
destroy the national character of those powers, and relegate them into the 
hands of discordant States ; how the dual character of our political system 
is essential to our safety, our peace, our development, and our happiness ; 
how its preservation stands between us and anarchy — if she had learned 
all this, and much more that she might have learned, she would perhaps 
have found that what she called the " American timidity " was a sound 
and wise conservatism, which the American people whom she knew had 
inherited from fathers who had been taught by practical suffering how to 
found a Government for a nation upon the necessities and conditions of its 
national life. 

4 



50 

learned from those who were qualified to tell her so. That 
there never was, or could be, a time when the North could 
have demanded from the South an elimination of what she 
calls the two pro-slavery clauses of the Constitution, on the 
ground of their inherent sinfulness, without forcing the South 
to dissolve the political partnership, was perfectly clear to 
those whose opinions she thought proper to reject. What she 
meant by our foreseeing the necessity in time, is not very 
clear. No promptitude of action, if the action was to be an 
elimination of " the pro-slavery clauses," could have been any- 
thing but an offer to the Southern States to go out of the 
Union. Suppose that offer had been made and accepted at 
any time from 1830 to 1860 : what good would that have done 
to the negro ? When the dissolution of the Union, forced on 
by causes in which " the irrepressible conflict " played a great 
part, was attempted in 1861-'65, we had demonstration enough 
of what the Southern States could do to maintain a separate 
national existence and pro-slavery institutions. It cost a great 
war, with all its attendant horrors and consequences, and a 
military conquest, to eliminate "the pro-slavery clauses" from 
the Federal Constitution ; and the idea of a peaceable disso- 
lution of the Union, to be followed by an immediate and 
peaceable reconstitution of the political " scheme," was proved 
to be the chimera which Mr. Webster always considered it. 
If by any stretch of the imagination we can conceive of a 
peaceable separation of the North and the South occurring at 
any time after 1830, slavery could never have been ended 
without a subsequent military conquest of the South by the 
North, such as we saw when the dissolution was not consented 
to by the latter and was attempted by the former. Now, the 
opinion that the removal of slavery was worth what it has 
cost, is one thing. The opinion that there was another and a 
better method, that might have been pursued if slavery had 
not been so attacked as to arouse individual and sectional pas- 
sions in its support, is one that must remain unshaken, because 
it has been confirmed by the stern and irrefutable logic of 
events that have passed into history. 

When, too, w T e look back to the sole ground, the single 
idea, in which the Abolitionists began and ended the whole of 



51 

their exertions — the inculcation of the doctrine that slave* 
holding was a sin and must be instantly abandoned, without 
consideration of means and consequences — one cannot help 
asking, Even if it was a sin, how did that justify a demand for 
its immediate cessation, proceeding from those who had no 
power and no inclination to propose a relief from the burthen 
of that sin ? He who undertakes to eradicate a sin that is par- 
ticipated in by multitudes and interwoven with the whole 
fabric of society, is as much bound by the laws of moral obli- 
gation to consider his means and to weigh the consequences 
of his methods, as he who undertakes to reform what is only 
an economical or social disadvantage. In proportion to the 
magnitude of the evil or the wrong, the more stringent are the 
limitations upon human duty which are marked by the con- 
sequences of insisting on a sudden change, without any propo- 
sal of a method by which the wrong can be made to cease, or 
any power to afford the least assistance to the doing of what 
is right. The Abolitionist would say that it was his mission 
to awaken the nation to a sense of the sin of slavery, and that, 
when he had done this, slavery would fall. The first and the 
only effect of his denunciation was to confirm the sinner in his 
sin, for the very sufficient reason that no aid was offered to 
him to help him in the effort to cease from sinning. The best 
minds in the northern section of America — saving always 
those " happy few " who considered that they alone "had hold 
of the root of all American problems " — shrank from the folly 
of denouncing every slave-holder as unworthy of the Christian 
name, and held that emancipation must be the work of slow, 
considerate, prudent, and safe legislation, governed principally 
by the economical and civil requirements of the problem. 
The Abolitionists rejected all such considerations, and held 
that the way was to denounce slavery as a sin, regardless of 
consequences. Posterity must judge between them. 

The ways of Providence are past finding out, and perhaps 
the time has not come for us to see all that can ever be seen 
of the designs of that Power which rules the destinies of na- 
tions. Those who come after us may be able to see a little 
more than we can. But there is one thing that even we can 
now perceive ; individual men are moral agents, and can be 



52 

comprehended by other men. We can understand the mo- 
tives, aims, and influences of a prominent statesman who 
sought to give a certain direction to public affairs. We can 
perceive the results to which his counsels and his acts plainly 
tended. We can ascertain, with a high degree of moral cer- 
tainty, that if his advice had been followed through a period 
sufficient to have produced its legitimate effects, disasters 
never could have occurred which did occur. To this conclu- 
sion we can come without in any way questioning the good 
which an Infinite Power has brought out of evil. The good 
in this case is the removal of African slavery. The evil con- 
sists in the mode in which that removal was reached. It 
might have been accomplished, if it had pleased God, by 
other means. If one of the wisest and greatest of men gave 
himself, with singleness of purpose, with unquestionable moral 
courage, and with unsurpassed intellectual power, to that con- 
servative action which would have saved us from a civil war, 
and secured the possibility of peaceful emancipation by the 
free legislation of the Southern States, are we to deny to him 
the praise that virtue and patriotism should earn for states- 
men, and to impute to him the low motives of the selfish and 
unprincipled politician? We are now in a period of our his- 
tory in which we are too much inclined, in looking back upon 
the time when slavery was interwoven with our political sys- 
tem, to underrate the difficulties which surrounded those who 
founded our Government, and which continued to surround 
those who immediately succeeded them. 

Slavery is gone — gone for ever — and we are not a little 
given to wonder that a union with slave-holders was ever tol- 
erated by the Northern framers of our Constitution. We 
must remember that, whatever may be the seeming inconsist- 
ency between some parts of the Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution of the United States as it came from 
the hands of its framers, the latter could not have been made 
and established if it had not been based upon the idea that it 
sought to secure " the blessings of liberty " to the one race of 
white men. We must remember, too, that in the succeeding 
age, in which Daniel Webster lived and acted, the Union 
could not be preserved without the fulfillment of all the guar- 



53 

antees and recognitions which the Constitution had accorded 
to slavery, and that the only hope for voluntary and bloodless 
emancipation lay absolutely dependent upon the preservation 
of peace. 

It is not to be denied that when Mr. Webster rose in the 
Senate, on the 7th day of March, 1850, to meet the crisis in 
which his country was then involved, he was surrounded by 
great personal perils. To borrow his own words, " The impris- 
oned winds were let loose." It was plain that he mast encoun- 
ter obloquy, misrepresentation, misconception, the alienation of 
friends, the bitterness of enemies. It might be that only in a 
far-distant day, when all earthly honors would be nought to him, 
would he be recognized as he should be. Yet he felt, and he 
said, that he had that within which would keep him to his 
duty, for the good of the whole and the preservation of all, 
during that fearful struggle through darkness and danger, 
whether the sun and the stars should appear or should not 
appear for many days — ay, or even for many years. 



54 



[The following remarkable poem, by William Cleaver 
Wilkinson, Professor in the Rochester Theological Seminary, 
appeared in Scrlh^s Monthly Magazine for April, 1877. 
I have obtained the author's permission to reprint it entire. 
It may fairly be set off against Whittier's " Ichabod."] 



WEBSTER. 

Fixed, like the pole, 
He stood, whatever moved, 
As if, though sole 
The shock to take and break, it him behooved. 

The shock he broke ; 
The multitudinous main 
Its waves awoke — 
Woke all its waves, and stormed the rock in vain. 

To joiu the waves, 
The mustering winds went forth 
From all their caves 
Against him, west, and east, and south, and north. 

The spinning void 
Of whirlwind, humming by 
In its cycloid, 
Paused, on that seated strength its strength to try. 

And the floods came — 
Deep called to deep aloud, 
Through the great frame 
Of Nature, 'twixt the billow and the cloud. 

And deluge rolled, 
From pole to pole one tide, 
Waste, as of old, 
And, weltering, shouldered huge against his side. 



55 



The thunderbolt, 
As when that Titan world 
Rose in revolt, 
Hot through the kindling air amain was hurled. 

And, whence it slept, 
Like a swift sword unsheathed, 
The lightning leapt, 
And round him its fierce arms of flame enwreathed. 

The rending throes 
Of earthquake to and fro, 
From their repose 
Rocked the perpetual hills, or laid them low. 

And still he stood — 
For the vexed planet still, 
Created good, 
Was whole, and held her course, and had her will. 

Around him cloud, 
Pale spectre of spent storm, 
Clung, like a shroud, 
And veiled awhile the inviolable form. 

But umpire Time, 
Serenely wise and just, 
With slow, sublime, 
Unalterable decision, and august, 

Cleansed this away, 
And, lo ! the glorious front, 
In candid day, 
Resumed, with solemn joy, its ancient wont. 






THE 



LAST YEARS 



OF 



DANIEL WEBSTER: 



A MONOGRAPH. 



BY / I 

GEORGE TICKNOR 1 CURTIS. 



NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 & 5 51 BROADWAY. 
1878. 



/ >**<&WTD'i. 



